While musing over yesterday's post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician's misdirection, I remembered Dennett's 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn't exist as some scientists think it does. Dennett argues that the 'hard problem' is a red herring - the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.
Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of indirect realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be second-hand and, worse, hidden behind a "veil of sensation"--a position that would slide easily into relativism and solipsism, presenting an ethical dilemma. In The Case for Qualia, proponents of qualia defend the Indirect Realist position and mount detailed counterarguments against opposing views.
For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena.
High-end talking shop, TED, has a couple of video lectures on 'memes' - the supposedly self-contained units of information, ideas or actions that replicate through human culture and are selected by a process akin to natural selection.
Neuromythology is the shibboleth of cognitive science that the mind is a machine, and that somehow our theories of information, complexity, patterns or representations are sufficient to explain consciousness. Tallis accuses cognitive scientists, and philosophers of cognitive science such as Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett, of the careless use of words which can apply both to thinking and to non-thinking systems ('computing', 'goals', 'memory', for example). This obfuscation "provides a framework within which the real problems can be by-passed and the illusion of progress maintained".
This is part of Dennett's campaign to overcome the mind-body split bequeathed to us by Descartes, who identified his existence with his self-consciousness (his Cogito) and believed that the thinking portion of the self was attached almost accidentally to the body. Like many in cognitive science, Dennett wants to show that mind and matter are not necessarily opposed. Mind is not made of different stuff than body -- not if body is understood to be an enormously complex information-processing system of which the brain is a part.
Ultimately what is important for Dennet is the functional claim rather than the anatomical claim (in personal correspondence, he has admitted as much). That is, the claim that there is no Cartesian Theatre is orthogonal to the anatomical claim that there is no place (in the brain) where it all comes together. Since the functional arguments never really convinced me, and there doesn't seem to be evidence for the anatomical side of the claim, I am not convinced there is no Cartesian Theatre. As Dennett says "It sure seems as if there is a Cartesian Theater" (italics mine).
Classic Dennett. "Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines."
The original recordings of Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett and V.S. Ramachandran talking about consciousness for Susan's book.
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place (or places) in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience.
Daniel Dennett's explanation of consciousness.
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Interview with Dennett about various subjects.
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Dennett's tome on consciousness.
Robert Wright interviews Daniel Dennett about quantum weirdness.
Daniel Dennett pontificates about consciousness at TED.
A wide range of video interviews with many intellectuals about hard philosophical questions.
